I sometimes fly to D.C. (our daughter lives there, for one thing) and it's so easy to hop on the Metro from National and quickly get downtown. Flying into Dulles, way out in the Virginia suburbs, is an expensive time suck.

Oddly enough, it wasn't until a couple of days later that I remembered that I once actually wanted to shut National down. That was more than 25 years, when we lived in Arlington, right under the main flight path into National.

Planes twisting up and down the Potomac River into the airport - located in the heart of a metropolis of more than 5 million - were loud enough to drown out conversation or the TV set in our living room, at least if the windows were open.

I used to grumble that the only reason that National, which sits on an expensive and very cramped piece of real estate, stayed open was because members of Congress found it so easy. My (not unique) idea was to sell off the airport and use the proceeds to extend Metro to Dulles International Airport. And to mollify members of Congress, you could have subsidized helicopter shuttles from Capitol Hill to Dulles.

It's a perfect example of the Politics of Me. If I had stayed in Arlington, I'd probably still be grumbling about National. Instead, I moved to Portland and, 25 years later, my first instinct is to cheer more flights into National. Tells you something about how we become so convinced about the rightness of our views depending on what most benefits us at that point in time.